What is Quality Assurance?

Quality assurance refers to the complete set of systems directed at meeting designated customer service standards. These systems include the following:

Establishing the requirements that are considered necessary to deliver high quality to the customer
Certifying the performance of suppliers with a rating system
Testing received goods and materials to ensure that they comply with quality standards
Ensuring that goods and materials are stored properly to avoid damage
Verifying the ongoing quality of internal processes, with a feedback loop to correct any issues found
Examining system output to ensure that quality standards are met

Quality assurance tends to focus on the prevention of quality issues early in the process, rather than merely trying to detect quality problems at the point when goods and services are about to be delivered to the customer. Early prevention reduces costs for the manufacturer, because it avoids the costs that would otherwise have been added to a product after a quality issue first arose. These added costs are a complete loss, if the initial quality issue causes a product to be scrapped.

Quality Assurance vs. Quality Control

Quality assurance activities are intended to prevent quality failures from occurring. This differs from quality control, which is more narrowly focused on just detecting the existence of quality issues; it is not remedial in nature. Thus, quality assurance is proactive, targeted at spotting issues as they occur, while quality control is reactive, targeted merely at the detection of issues.